Taboo the phrase "placebo effect", please. That term was coined to refer to psychological effects intruding on non-psychological studies. When the goal is to achieve a psychological effect, it becomes meaningless or misleading.

You should probably read the earlier part of the thread, where I distinguished between what might be called "uncertainty effect" (thinking you're getting better, when you're not) and "expectation effect", where an expectation of success (or failure) actually leads to behavior change. This latter effect is functionally indistinguishable from the standard placebo effect, and is very likely to be the exact same thing.

As you point out, we want expectation effects to occur. Affirmations, LoA, and hypnosis are all examples of methods specifically aimed at creating intentional expectation effects, but any method can of course produce them unintentionally.

The main difference between expectation effect and "placebo classic" is that placebo classic loses its effect when somebody discovers that it's a placebo... well, actually that's still just another expectation effect, since people who take a real drug and think it's a placebo also react to it less.

Everything we know about human beings points to expectation effects being incredibly powerful, but it seems relatively little research is devoted to properly exploiting this. Perhaps it's too useful to be considered high status, or perhaps not "serious enough".